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France faces fresh HIV blood scandal

By
TARA PATEL in
PARIS

French government officials delayed the approval of an American screening
test for detecting HIV in blood to give a domestic company more time to
develop a similar product, according to reports by the French daily, Liberation.
The delay meant that in the first half of 1985, hundreds of people a month
were being infected with HIV through blood transfusions. Screening was not
made obligatory until August that year, although it was known that there
was a risk of infection from blood.

This incident, which was first hinted at in a government report in September
1991, is France’s second blood scandal. Last year, three former health officials
were jailed for delaying the introduction of heat treatment for blood products.
In that case, some 1500 haemophiliacs were infected with HIV from contaminated
clotting factor.

The American drugs company Abbott applied for permission to sell its
HIV test in France in January 1985. At the time, Diagnostics Pasteur,
which is jointly owned by the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the pharmaceuticals
company Elf-Sanofi, was trying to develop an HIV test.

Extracts of documents published in Liberation suggest that the former
health minister Edmond Herve and the former prime minister Laurent Fabius
delayed approval of the Abbott test even though French laboratories had
recommended approval. The documents also suggest that the officials knew
that the Pasteur test was not ready for the market at this stage, because
it was still giving too many false negative results.

Francois Gros, a former adviser to Fabius who signed many of the documents,
said last week that he was not told how big the risk was from contaminated
blood. Diagnostics Pasteur also issued a statement denying that there were
problems with the reliability of its tests. The company says it applied
for permission to sell its test shortly after Abbott.